'Birdy' takes flight at Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in Wellesley

By Alexander Stevens, Correspondent

Thursday

Feb 14, 2019 at 7:00 AMFeb 20, 2019 at 6:04 PM

The distinct tone of the movie is probably one reason why Naomi Wallace avoided watching it. In 1997, she was commissioned by a British theater company to write a stage adaptation of the story, which was a novel by William Wharton before it became a film. Now Commonwealth Shakespeare Company stages her adaptation of “Birdy” Feb. 27 to March 17 at Babson College in Wellesley.

Perhaps the film “Birdy” flutters around on the periphery of your memory.

You’d have to be a certain age to have seen it in a movie theater. It came out in 1984, launching the careers of Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage.

It’s the kind of film that can stick with you, because it aimed higher than most movies, telling the tender, touching story of two friends trying to cope with the scars of war.

The distinct tone of the movie is probably one reason why Naomi Wallace avoided watching it. In 1997, she was commissioned by a British theater company to write a stage adaptation of the story, which was a novel by William Wharton before it became a film. Now Commonwealth Shakespeare Company stages her adaptation of “Birdy” Feb. 27 to March 17 at Babson College in Wellesley.

“I immediately read the Wharton novel,” Wallace says. “I had seen the film a long time ago, and I wanted to keep it out of my head.”

What did she think when she read the novel?

“I thought, ‘Hell, adapting this to the stage is going to be really difficult!’ ” she says with a laugh.

Wallace, winner of a MacArthur fellowship, was responding to the deep interior monologues in the novel.

“So much of it is stream-of-consciousness,” says Wallace, who knew that long ruminations aren’t well-suited to the stage. “I realized that in order to cajole a novel onto the stage, you have to completely reinvent it. I wanted to rethink the novel from the ground up. If someone in the audience thinks, ‘Oh, this must have been a novel,’ then you’ve failed.”

In the story, Al and Birdy are childhood friends. Birdy is a peculiar young man with an obsession with birds, a gift for mechanics and, possibly, a plan to take flight.

The two young men enlist in the Army during World War II, and they’re both forever altered by their experiences. Birdy is no longer speaking, and Al, fighting his own PTSD, is enlisted to help bring Birdy back to Earth.

“There are some beautiful moments that you really want to get on stage,” says Wallace. “There was so much in the story, it just had to be teased off the page and onto the stage.”

She knew “Birdy” would give her a chance to play with time.

“The novel moves back and forth in time,” she says. “The theater can bring the past right up to the present in very powerful ways. When you have the past, or the dead, standing next to the living on stage, it’s a very magical and haunting thing.”

Wallace decided early on to have age-appropriate actors play the childhood versions of Al and Birdy. Some playwrights may have balked at the idea of adding young actors to the mix, but not Wallace.

“I’ve always loved having children on stage,” says Wallace, who was born in Kentucky, but now lives in a hamlet in northern England. “So often we don’t give them enough credit for their intelligence. I don’t like it when you have 25-year-old actors playing 12-year-old characters.”

In the novel, Al and Birdy are veterans of World War II, but when it was turned into a movie, the filmmakers decided to update it to the Vietnam War. Wallace understands the temptation, because its messages about war are so contemporary. But she returned the story to World War II.

Besides, no one in the audience is going to miss the point: The issue of traumatized soldiers is as relevant now as it was in 1972, 1944, 1916, 1865, and, well, you get the point.

Wallace also believes the play is about more than war and its aftermath, and she thinks of a quote by William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Certainly, observes Wallace, Al and Birdy have not left the past behind. Traumas tend to be lifelong companions.

“We’re talking about a play that deals with war, and it can sound very dour,” says Wallace. “But there’s also a lot of light and humor in the story. Even though it may deal with a dark issue, there’s still room for laughter. Traumatized people often find humor in the darkness. And this is also a story about friendship, and two young men who refuse to give up.”

Wharton, who passed away in 2008, is in Wallace’s thoughts as Commonwealth Shakespeare Company mounts this production of “Birdy.” She knows she took liberties with his story, including, most notably, a reworked ending.

“I wasn’t trying to transfer the novel to the stage; I was trying to adapt the spirit of it to the stage,” she says. “In the end, I think Mr. Wharton would be happy with where we took his story.”